HD-DVD hits our shores

Toshiba has now introduced a laptop with a HD-DVD drive. And gave us details on HD-DVD.

Recently we spent some time with Toshiba previewing its latest HD-DVD enabled multimedia laptop, and had an opportunity to discuss Toshiba’s take on the next iteration of format wars. On display was the Qosmio (pronounced Cosmo with an ‘i’) multimedia laptop. It is the first laptop to ship in Australia with an integrated HD-DVD drive. It’s read-only at the moment; we should expect writable HD-DVD drives at the end of the year.

Some other noteworthy specifications include an Nvidia Geforce 7600 with HDMI output, Core Duo T2600 (2.16GHz dual core), 200GB of HDD space spread across two 100GB SATA drives, Intel HD audio equipped with Dolby Pro Logic 2 (which emulates surround from the integrated Harman Kardon speakers) and Windows XP Media Centre 2005. Wireless connectivity includes Bluetooth V2.0 and 802.11- a, b and g wireless LAN. As this is primarily a multimedia notebook, there are included digital and analogue TV tuners.

The screen is a 17.1” TFT with a 1920x1200 resolution. The 16:10 aspect ratio will require a little letterboxing to display full HD while maintaining HD-DVD’s 16:9 aspect ratio. HD-DVD runs at 1920x1080, so 120 horizontal lines are not used but the video is presented without downscaling and at full resolution.

On the topic of next generation display technology, surface-conduction electron-emitter displays (SEDs) should be expected in TVs in the last quarter of 2007 and in laptops sometime towards the beginning of 2008. SEDs are miniaturized CRT emitters that replace backlights in a TFT display. They are placed behind every pixel, and should improve contrast massively, providing better image fidelity than a CRT display in the footprint of an LCD display.

Toshiba also gave us their take on the current state of play on the next-generation format wars. Toshiba, along with NEC, are the main players in the HD-DVD camp, and outlined why it believes HD-DVD has the edge over the Sony led Blue Ray alternative.

Once you strip away the hype regarding the virtues of each particular format in the War on Standards, the pros of HD-DVD turn out to be geared mostly toward manufacturers in an attempt to increase consumer uptake during the initial release. Even though HD-DVD’s storage capacities are less than Sony’s Blue Ray, they require minimal modification of the production plants that are already manufacturing DVDs.

HD-DVD has also been designed to appease the industry, with implementation of 128-bit AACS copy protection in lieu of DVD’s broken 40-bit CSS. It can scale from straight piracy control up to sharing content with other networked devices, such as media servers, depending on the rights that production houses chose to implement. The popularity of bonus and interactive features of DVDs has been built on, in the form of iHD. It permits interactivity such as user-definable positioning of subtitles, and streaming content.

An interesting feature of HD-DVD that will appeal to consumers is a combination version of HD-DVD, which can be written to like a DVD-10 (where two independent DVD 5s are written to the two sides of the disc). The combination HD-DVD can accommodate a layer of HD-DVD on one side and a standard DVD on another, accessible by inserting the disc upside down. Toshiba is banking on HD-DVD being consumer friendly, as this upgrade path for early adopters illustrates.

For those worried about the capacity of the new disc mediums being unable to store enough information to provide HD content for the duration of a film and its extras, the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers has ratified new codecs for use in HD-DVD, providing some comfort. DVD is encoded with MPEG2, whereas HD-DVD and Blue Ray are encoded with new codecs which provide better compression, resulting in lower bit rates and better picture.

Both HD-DVD and Blue Ray support MPEG4 H.264 -- the latest addition to the MPEG4 standard, and VC-1 -- the SMPTE edition of Microsoft’s WMV version 9 codec, which can ramp up its bit rate to handle HD content. Neither of these codecs had been developed when the original DVD specification was finalized by SMPTE, which means that DVD’s existing, non-upgradeable compression algorithms will not be able to lower the bit rate of the HDTV footage for playback through current DVD hardware. DVD’s existing 11Mb/s data rate is too low to support HDTV encoded in MPEG2, just in case you were wondering.

Consumer demand for the storage and playback of HDTV and other HD sources has driven the implementation of better codecs and higher capacity discs, and regardless of which format wins at the end of the day, the industry is moving to satisfy our lust for rich and detailed images by planning their next wave of data storage technologies. The future of on-demand consumer HDTV is now one step closer, regardless of who eventually wins the format war.